


veins of gold

by jaegerjagues



Series: saudade [2]
Category: She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018)
Genre: Beast Island, F/M, Post Season 3, description of stab wounds, mentions of emily (rip emily), pretty standard she-ra stuff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-01
Updated: 2019-11-01
Packaged: 2021-01-18 10:20:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,088
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21274613
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jaegerjagues/pseuds/jaegerjagues
Summary: Entrapta has everything worked out for herself on Beast Island. Mostly. Kind of. Probably?Hordak's arrival helps.
Relationships: Entrapta/Hordak (She-Ra)
Series: saudade [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1533605
Comments: 7
Kudos: 145





	veins of gold

**Author's Note:**

> it took a while, and i'm not totally happy with it, but! it exists! in time for season 4!
> 
> also! probably won't make sense if you haven't read saudade?

Beast Island isn’t all that bad.

Sure, there isn’t a power grid. No tiny, delicious foods. No real lab and none of the tools she was used to working with, unless you counted the six sided hex driver that had been in her pocket when she arrived. No one she knew, except for Imp and Emily.

But that was okay! She had told herself so over the past couple of months, enough that she believed it. She was treating the whole adventure like one big experiment, even though she had to record it on paper (ugh) and didn’t have a control. Nothing to really compare it to, unless she could somehow get her hands on her notes about human behavior from the Princess Prom.

She had done what she could with what she had. They were still using candles when she arrived! Candles, and not even the magic kind. The magic kind she would have accepted, if not questioned the practicality of.

But candles? In wood huts?

It was the first thing she had fixed.

* * *

_Entrapta had woken up in a small room, right wrist shackled to the wall. Her mouth tasted like it was full of cotton, and there was a spot on her back that throbbed with every breath she took. Everything ached, and she couldn’t think, and--_

_Imp dug his tiny little claws into her thigh, drawing her attention away from her hurts. He chirped at her, sad but curious, wings tucked tight against his back. “Where are we?” she asked, voice a croak._

_He hauled himself up in her lap, curled his tail around his little feet._

_“Put her on the next transport for Beast Island,” Catra said from Imp’s mouth._

_“Catra wouldn’t do that! We’re friends!” At least, Entrapta thought they were friends. She wasn’t super well versed in the whole friendship thing, but certainly people stayed friends even after they stopped talking._

_Didn’t they?_

_“You decided to come with me?”_

_Imp nodded his head vigorously before curling up against her chest, head tucked under her chin._

* * *

Her tools are limited to what she’s managed to scrounge up from the First Ones ruins and what the villagers had on hand when she arrived. It isn’t much, far less than she’d like to have, but Hordak’s exo-suit is a mess.

His arrival had been sudden and long past the date she had expected him. Almost a month, but in the long run it didn’t really matter; he had come, after all! All the way out to Beast Island!

She was just so excited to see him, in the (mostly) flesh. Excited, after more than three months to have someone to talk to who understood what she was talking about. Oh, sure, some of the people who survived Beast Island were engineers, inventors, and the like but she could tell from the looks they gave her that they didn’t understand or weren’t interested in what she had to say.

Not like Hordak was. Is. Will be for the rest of her life, she hopes.

“This is not the condition I left it in!” There are dents and scratches all over the surface of her work, discolored patches on the metal from where it hasn’t been properly cared for.

Seeing the exo-suit in such disrepair hurts her nearly as much as it hurt to dismantle Emily. She can’t fix it, not with her limited resources, but she can make sure it keeps his pain at bay.

Hordak huffs. He seems distracted, but she thinks that might just be his natural state outside of the Fright Zone. “Things have not been . . . optimal.”

“Sit down,” she orders him, then uses her hair to push him into the sole clean surface in her room. It’s the mat she naps on, when she can be bothered to find her way to it. He oofs, and it isn’t like the noise he would make in the Fright Zone when she would push him out of the way. It’s pained, the noise the same pitch he had emitted when he had fainted before her. “Are you . . . sick? Still?”

“I don’t think being stabbed is an illness.”

A knife that could cut through the armor and the augmentation grafted onto Hordak’s skin? “What kind of material was the knife?” she demands, cogs in her head turning. “Where can it be found? Is it a good conductor? What’s the melting point? Is it--”

Her mind shudders to a stop as she works the bottom plate loose, bringing the wound to light. It’s ugly, purple-black and puckered at the edges and sunken in the middle.

It’s awful.

Something like sadness and rage well up in her throat, stinging the backs of her eyes.

Why would someone want to do this? Why would anyone stab Hordak? And in the back?

  
Sure, Hordak had come to Etheria and intended on enslaving the entire planet. And he wasn’t the nicest. But you just had to get to know him, and then you would know: he was passionate about the things he liked. And that was hard, unless you were as stubborn as Entrapta was.

“If you were a machine, I could fix you,” she says, quiet, gloved fingers lightly tracing the edges of the wound. He winces under her fingers and she withdraws them.

“I’m mostly machine.”

“Not enough.” She’ll have to have Micah or someone else who knows the body look at the wound. She can’t do anything, herself, and doesn’t know what healing looks like.

But there is something she can do: The exo-suit. His armor. The pieces that keep him alive on Etheria, that were supposed to keep him protected. She can fix those, make them stronger, make sure nothing can cut through it again.

Make sure he can’t be hurt, so long as he wears it.

* * *

_The Horde soldiers shove her off of the boat and into the shallows unceremoniously, warm water eddying around her knees. Imp hisses at them from her shoulder, one tiny hand dug into her scalp and the other scratching at the air. Emily follows, feet splashing and hydraulics whirling as she raises herself to avoid the waves._

_She did manage to steal one of their electric prods and hide it within Emily. For later. They certainly haven’t seemed to notice it’s missing._

_In the forest, the air is cloying and thick. Her clothes stick uncomfortably to her skin, damp and itchy and deeply uncomfortable. The salt from the ocean doesn’t help, chafing where her boots rub at her legs. On her shoulders, Imp gets heavier with each step, the weight of him pressing down like the forest._

_If she keeps going, she might end up like a pancake. A cute, tiny pancake, complete with pigtails, but a sweaty pancake nonetheless._

_And then there’s Emily, built for this kind of ranging. Entrapta wishes she were a robot, too, complete with hydraulic lifts so she wouldn’t have to climb over vines and roots that shoot out from the trees, taller than she is and thrice as big around and probably a little sentient._

_If she were fonder of organic matter, this could almost be considered enjoyable. A learning experience. Instead she’s just miserable, in a place she doesn’t know and certainly doesn’t like! She’s lonely, despite Imp and Emily being with her--she misses Hordak. And Catra, because now that she’s thought about it, she’s beginning to doubt that Catra would actually send her to Beast Island. Maybe Imp got it wrong, and Catra was just repeating what someone else had said._

_. . . right? That had to be it. Catra wouldn’t betray her. They were friends, and friends didn’t do that._

* * *

“Entrapta?”

She looks up from the bit of suit she’s repairing, flicking her cobbled together welding torch off. Adora hovers apprehensively in the doorway to her quarters, shoulders drawn in as she chews on her lower lip.

“Hi Adora!” she greets, exuberant. Then she remembers that Hordak is asleep on the mat behind her, thin blanket tucked up over his shoulders and Imp wrapped in his arms. She doesn’t think he’s gotten nearly as much sleep as she has in the past few months. “We have to be quiet.”

Adora looks past Entrapta and makes a face, but steps over the threshold and into the room. One hand cups the opposite elbow, pulling it close to her middle.

“I, uh. Wanted to apologize.”

Entrapta sets her tools down; swivels in her seat to face Adora fully. "For what?"

"Leaving you in the Fright Zone." Adora takes a deep breath, fills her lungs with the too-heavy air island air.

A dehumidifier, Entrapta thinks, sudden_. I need to build a dehumidifier._

“Entrapta--”

“You already apologized, didn’t you?” The sword had been in Entrapta's arms, Adora chained to a column in the lab. The portal had nearly been complete. Had Hordak pulled the lever? Had the portal worked with the sword as a key? And if it had failed, what did it look like? Had it caused any damage? Wormholes, time loops, alternate realities?

“Well, yeah, but--”

“Then why are you doing it again?” There was no reason for another apology. Entrapta had accepted it, moved on, hadn’t expected one in the first place.

“We thought you were dead, Entrapta!” Adora says. “If we had thought, even for a moment, that you were alive, we wouldn’t have. I wouldn’t have left you there. I would have done everything I could to make sure you got out with us, if I had another chance.”

“I told you: I liked it there. The Fright Zone was fun! I got to experiment! And I made more friends, like Hordak, and Scorpia, and Catra!”

Adora sucks air in through her teeth. “Catra’s not--”

“Catra is still my friend. Even if she sent me here. Just like you’re still my friend, and Glimmer, and the others.”

“Right.” Adora doesn’t sound so sure.

* * *

_Something moves in the night._

_Emily is up immediately, lens glowing bright purple and cutting through the dark._

_Entrapta hears it, whatever it is. Large and slowly moving through the underbrush. Imp pushes his head up beneath her chin, claws digging into the bare skin of her neck (the bits that aren’t already bug bitten and itching). A little growl has worked up in his throat, a warning sign to whatever might be lurking._

_Now probably isn’t the best time to tell him it isn’t a very scary sound._

_Emily could defend her, maybe. But if Emily doesn’t hit the target just right, the entire jungle around them could go up in flames._

_She pats herself down for something, anything to defend herself with. She isn’t good in a fight, is really more of a pacifist when given the chance, but now she’s in survival mode. Things she wouldn’t normally do are an option, now._

_Her fingers close around the six sided hex driver still in the pocket of her overalls; she really wishes she had stolen one of the electrified prods from the Horde soldiers when they weren’t looking._

_“I am--I am armed! And dangerous!” she warns whatever is out there, free hand coming up to press Imp closer to her chest as she thrusts the driver into the air before her. “Very dangerous! The most dangerous!”_

_What comes out of the jungle is not what she expects._

* * *

She’s piecing the exo-suit back onto Hordak’s body when Adora comes back.

Entrapta’s done what she can with what she has to work out some of the kinks. It’s not perfect, and won’t save him from another random stabbing, but she’s pleased that she got the scratches out. The pieces don’t click together well by hand; Next version needs to be easier to reassemble manually.

Hordak holds the lower half of the encasement for his right arm as Entrapta works the top half into place, hands and hair toiling together. They haven’t spoken much since he woke from his nap; Entrapta was done with the suit, by then, and had started cobbling together pieces to try and make a dehumidifier, and had descended upon him with his armor the second she noticed he was coherent.

All of their focus is on the suit, and Entrapta doesn’t notice when someone darkens her doorway.

Not until the last piece clicks into place, some of her hair trapped painfully in the seams where the plates meet. She isn’t about to undo their hard work, choosing instead to yank her hair out, leaving a chunk of it behind.

“That’s one way to do it.”

Hordak pulls his arm out of her grip like it burns through the metal, immediately defensive given their company. She misses the contact, but shoves the yearning down.

Micah and Adora stand together near one of her work tables. Adora is looking everywhere but at her and Hordak, and Micah just looks wrung out and thinned at the edges. Like the island and the years have finally caught up to him, come crashing down in the few short hours Adora and Hordak have been within the village.

“I’m going back to Brightmoon,” Adora announces

“There’s only room for two on the horse.” The way Hordak says horse makes Entrapta think of the way she says nature--unimpressed and like he’d rather forget it existed.

“Yes, for me and King Micah. You’re staying here with Entrapta.”

“You’re not taking me back and putting me in the prison cell in Brightmoon?”

“Brightmoon has a prison?” Micah asks.

They ignore him.

“You can’t get off the island, and I’m pretty sure Glimmer would rather see me come back with her dad instead of you. And this way, you and Entrapta can come up with something really great that can kick Horde What’s-His-Bucket right in the butt!"

“Has it escaped your notice that everyone outside of this hut wants to kill me?”

“Oh,” Adora says, partially under her breath but just loud enough to hear, “it’s some of the people inside the hut, too.”

Entrapta clears her throat.

“I mean, pssh,_ what_.” Adora coughs awkwardly.

* * *

_There’s a village on the island._

_In the grand scheme of things, it isn’t the most surprising thing Entrapta has discovered in the past twelve hours. Throw a diverse enough crowd onto an island and keep doing it periodically, and there’s bound to be people who adapt and thrive in the new environment. They’ve come together, built up a community, have discovered resources and ways to thrive._

_“Tea.” Imp takes the wooden cup that is offered, sniffing at it daintily before deeming it safe and passing it off to Entrapta._

_The man who found her in the jungle, who sits across from her now sipping on his own tea cup, is a sharper version of her fuzzy childhood memories. He’s thinner than she remembers. More washed out than the solid color that lights her recollections._

_King Micah of Brightmoon had been the first to visit Dryl and offer his condolences after the death of her parents._

_King Micah of Brightmoon was also reportedly dead. For a dead man, his tea was okay._

_“How did you end up here?” he prods, gentle._

_She tells him all of it. The good parts, the bad parts, the I-might-kind-of-really-like-Hordak parts. She scoops out every part of herself and lays it out between them in the same methodical way she takes any piece of machinery apart. She’s as hollow as her empty tea cup by the time she’s done; she feels overexposed._

_Micah, to his credit, lets her babble. Takes in every word that falls from her mouth and absorbs it like a sponge, never interrupting. Not until the very end, when he says, “You’ve been through a bit since I saw you last.”_

_And she has, hasn’t she? It isn’t something she likes to think about._

_“Glimmer reminds me of you,” she blurts. “Thoughtful, I mean.” And when it boils down to it, that’s all she really remembers of King Micah--that he was thoughtful. When her parents had died, no one had asked her how she felt. What it was like. If she was really okay in the empty halls of her castle, rattling about with no one around except for her nanny and the mounds of research her mother left behind. But Micah had seen her in the corner, looked at her instead of over her, drawn her out and propped her up. She doesn’t remember what they talked about, really, just that they had._

_She sees the candle, then, sitting in the corner of the ramshackle wooden space they’re in and her mind short-circuits because why would anyone use a candle for a light source?_

* * *

Entrapta seems to be the only person happy that Hordak is on Beast Island. Well, and Imp.

Everyone else is . . . less so.

Okay, okay, so they’re not happy. At all. In fact, Entrapta has seen at least three people pacing around the outside of her shack with pitchforks and five more with torches. Micah and Adora have done what they can to mitigate the furor, but apparently there’s only so much the assumed dead king of Brightmoon and She-Ra can do. Especially when they aren’t around.

Entrapta knows that Hordak isn’t well liked. That he’s done things that some people see less as character flaws and more as absolutely unforgivable. And Entrapta knows that if she wasn’t so close to the situation, if she didn’t know him the way she does, she would probably see everything he’s done as horrific.

And what he’s done is horrible. Unforgivable. But Entrapta helped him do some of it, in the name of science. When she had first arrived, and Micah had told them who she was and what she had done, they had been hesitant. They had warmed up to her, eventually, especially once she made it so they didn’t have to use candles or be wary of the First Ones tech scattered on the island.

It will be a delicate balance, trying to get the people to warm to the one who ordered them here in the first place. It’s a daunting task to look at, knowing she can’t build her way out of it or talk anyone into seeing things her way. She isn’t Catra, or Adora--she doesn’t have a way with words, or charisma, or a sword that can turn her into a legendary warrior.

What she does have is a treasure trove of untouched First Ones tech and Hordak, and with him at her side?

She’s positive anything is possible.

**Author's Note:**

> as always, i am being incorrigible on twitter @tempteight


End file.
